Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Mad Max: Thunder Road

I’d heard so many positive
comments about Mad Max: Thunder Road
(2015; dir. George Miller) that I came to the film with great hopes of, at
least, an entertaining two hours. It showed up on a number of high profile "Best Films of 2015" lists. How could I lose? It was a dismal time.

There is a
plot here, tenuous enough that you hardly notice it. It is a plausible justification for what
actually occupies the screen for most of the film’s duration: huge trucks
powering across dusty, empty red deserts at high rates of speed.Occasionally there are human refugees left
over from whatever apocalypse destroyed the world.They have all reverted to the kind of
savagery we see in Lord of the Flies,
or in Mr. Kurtz’s “unspeakable rites” of Heart
of Darkness.A few of these remaining
savage humans are somewhat less benighted than the others.They are our heroes. Furious driving, bomb
blasts, bullets, and ingenious Rube Goldberg engines of destruction
abound.So do bizarre costumes and
facial makeup.And, inexplicably, there are
diaphanously clad vestal virgins, the future consorts of the evil villain who’s
only slightly more evil than everyone else.What a snore.

Paucity of gasoline seems to be
an issue.Yet in transporting precious
gasoline back and forth across the deserts, our characters expend incredible
amounts of it in their speedy trucks.
What a snore.

Mad Max is the apocalypse as a 14-year old’s wet dream cartoon
nightmare. My favorite elements of the
film were the names of the main characters: Tom Hardy plays Max Rockatansky, while
Charlize Theron, hardly recognizable, is Imperator Furiosa.The evil villain is Rictus Erectus.Happy days are here again.